Cage Fighting

Listening to the radio, I was invited to attend a sport spectacular—cage fighting! Now there’s an opportunity I hate to miss. How have I made it so long without watching the equivalent of a barroom fight, a sanctioned barroom fight?

I have seen “barroom” fights, street fights by another name. More than that, I have seen and dealt legally with the results of such fights. Two brothers began a fight in a cheap and sleazy bar which was carried on outside after the management ordered them to leave. One of the brothers pulled a knife, a small pocket knife with no more than a 2 or 3 inch blade. He stabbed his brother and, unfortunately, cut his abdominal aorta artery which resulted in death in a very short time. The fight ended in tragedy. The young man was dead and the other was charged with murdering his brother, and a grieving mother was left behind.

A man and his wife were in an argument which, as often happened between the two of them, turned into physical violence. Each of them was giving as well as they got. She introduced a lamp into the fight and he picked up a piece of firewood, savagely beating her to death. Four young children saw their mother killed by their father who was also lost to them as he had to go to prison for his crime.

Tumbleweeds blew from one field to another, something difficult to control in the American Southwest. The farmer on whom they were blowing got angry as they were getting into his cotton field, there was a confrontation and a fight broke out, one of the men getting the best of the other. The loser of the fight went to town, borrowed a handgun from a local service station and went looking for the other man, finding him at the local pool hall. Finding him there playing dominoes, he sat across from him and asked if he was still feeling brave. The winner of the fight declared he could do it again, whereupon the loser shot him under the table. The bullet entered the victim’s upper abdomen and resulted in death.

These are tragic results from uncontrolled violence. No one expected these things to happen. Those brothers would not have decided to kill each other in normal circumstances. That husband was never expected to beat his wife to death. I’m sure those two farmers spent some good times visiting over the fence, sharing likes and dislikes. The problem is that violence takes on a life of its own. And “controlled” becomes “uncontrollable.”

Violence is becoming an alarming phenomenon in our country. We lament the fact that there is bullying in schools, playgrounds, sports and even families. Fighting, always something of a problem between boys, is now becoming a problem among girls. Physical fights seem to erupt in places we never would have expected before. And they are often recorded for posterity and placed on “Youtube.”

As responsible persons are looking for an answer to this problem, as we try to encourage non-violence, non-violent living and non-violent methods of problem solving, we continue to send mixed messages to society. We speak of the humorous aspects of fighting. We promote fighting and other violence in the media. Movies and television especially use this mode to entertain us. And now, as if we don’t have enough sports, we put two men in a cage and let them fight bare-knuckled for our entertainment and call it a sport. It says very little for these men to engage in such activities but it says even less for us, the spectator.

The “fan”, often a sports-talk radio host who is paid to promote, raises the objection, “Well, boxing’s violent too.” To which I reply, “Okay? Is that the best you have?” There is a difference in both the training and the history of boxing but I don’t have any difficulty comparing the two when discussing the problem of violence in our society. One of the more objectionable aspects of either is that poor people, people with little or no opportunity in life other than fighting for our amusement, are the ones in the ring. We, the fat, pampered and spoiled consumer, are the ones who have an orgasmic-like reaction to the suffering of the young man in the ring. And one shouldn’t compare cage fighting to the violence of football and basketball, it reveals ignorance.

A more apt comparison would be to the gladiators of ancient Rome. This insatiable appetite for human violence on other humans as an entertainment spectacle has always been cited as one of the examples of the diminution of the soul and spirit of the Romans. How far are we from the point of fights to the death? We have people on death row, should we allow them to fight to the death for our entertainment? Is there any activity known to be part of the Roman gladiatorial system which we would find objectionable?

Bare-knuckle fighting, cage fighting, is an unnecessary “sport” which by its very nature is designed to harm someone else. People are harmed in football, basketball, baseball, soccer and virtually every other organized sport. But the harm is incidental to the sport whereas harm is fundamental to cage fighting. Nothing designed to harm another person should be celebrated as a sport, not for the participant and not for the spectator. Neither can engage in the activity without lessening their humanity.